OPINION: PR? No. Water district is protecting ratepayers

Litigation by the San Diego County Water Authority is a direct attack on Inland water customers. If the lawsuit succeeds, the ratepayers of Eastern Municipal Water District stand to lose $180 million over 75 years.

The Eastern Municipal Water District (EMWD) is responsible for providing reliable and affordable water services to more than 775,000 residents and businesses in western Riverside County. We take very seriously our obligation to protect our customers and our ratepayers from any threats to that reliability and affordability.

A recent Press-Enterprise editorial was critical of actions we took in direct defense of our customers (âDonât duck accountability for dubious PR spending,â Our Views, Dec. 6). We stand by those actions as necessary to protect our customers from a massive cost shift to our ratepayers of more than $180 million.

Over the past few years the San Diego County Water Authority has waged a relentless legal, lobbying and public relations attack on EMWD and other Southern California water agencies to unfairly shift hundreds of millions of dollars in water transportation costs to other southland ratepayers.

In direct response to the authorityâs attacks and litigation, we retained a firm to evaluate if providing balanced information about southland water issues in San Diego could promote a more collaborative relationship. The effort did not progress beyond the planning phase.

EMWD and the authority are both part of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California â" a large, member-formed water agency responsible for procuring and delivering water for all of Southern California.

EMWD and 25 other member water agencies pool together to share in the cost of purchasing, transporting and delivering water. The structure is simple and fair: Each agency pays the same per-unit cost for transporting and treating water and for maintaining the Metropolitan transportation system.

Despite this equitable structure, the authority has filed four lawsuits in the past 12 years challenging the rate structure so it could pay less for transporting water â" forcing the remaining agencies to pay more.

In the current litigation, the authority is seeking to shift a staggering $3 billion in costs to ratepayers in Riverside, Ventura, San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Orange counties. EMWDâs share would be $180 million.

The P-E questions why our agency developed a plan to better communicate with our neighboring water district, and why we didnât leave the matter to Metropolitan. The authorityâs litigation is a direct attack on our customers. Water rates for Metropolitan are a zero-sum game. If one Metropolitan member gets away with paying less, everyone else pays more.

Given that the stakes are so high, we believe the actions we took to prepare the plan, and the costs we paid, are justifiable.

Through its aggressive political campaign, the authority has vilified Eastern and the rest of the Southern California water community, claiming it wants water âindependence.â In contrast, Eastern believes that a regional, collaborative approach is best.

In the name of independence, the authority has overpaid for water supplies it has secured from sources other than Metropolitan. According to a 2012 report by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, the authority spent $140 million more for 330,000 acre-feet of water it purchased from the Imperial Irrigation District than if it had purchased the same amount of water from Metropolitan.

Additionally, the authority has nearly tripled its debt load in just eight years â" escalating debt from $864 million to $2.45 billion. The bottom line is that the authority has made costly water purchases and financial decisions that itâs attempting to shift onto other agencies.

As for the public records release, we initially withheld some documents because they were central to the authorityâs pending lawsuit. Once the litigation obstacles were clear, we quickly released relevant documents and continue to coordinate with the authorityâs counsel to ensure that all requested documents are produced.

We want our community to know: EMWD is doing what we can to protect our customers from a massive, unfair cost shift.

Paul D. Jones II, P.E., is the general manager of Eastern Municipal Water District in Perris.

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